A Trip Down Hemingway
“Sometimes the greatest gift you can give yourself is the time and space to allow the story to find what it needs to be.”
That's a quote from an interview I did with the Idaho Mountain Express in November 2021. I was talking about the story I had road-tripped 1,000 miles to write: “Sunset & Time,” a time-travel detective novel... my first.
I had driven from Los Angeles to Ketchum, Idaho to be the Writer In Residence at the Ernest & Mary Hemingway House. There I would write my novel and give a public reading of my work.
The road trip took two very long, liberating days. The whole journey had taken two much less liberating years.
My short story “Bury Me In The Garden” had won me the residency in September 2019. I was due to spend two weeks there in March 2020.
I booked my hotels in Utah and Idaho. I packed my road trip supplies. The day before departure, Idaho confirmed its first Covid case. Public buildings were shutting down.
Departure morning, on a call with Program Director Martha, we decided it was best not to go. Three days later, Los Angeles was in lockdown. We rescheduled for March 2021.
We all know how the next year went. When that rolled around, Ketchum was still only part opened. But I was reluctant to put it off again: how many chances would I get at this?
Thankfully Martha and the Community Library team were extremely accommodating, and when November 2021 rolled around, I was ready.
I loaded up my Mustang and off we rode. The V-6's three-hundred and five horses growled at me, and I yelled the Stones' “Wild Horses” right back at them.
Seventy miles from Las Vegas, skirting the Mojave National Preserve, I got quiet. Plumb-line straight Joshua tree-flanked blacktop stretched way beyond what I could see.
“A long, long slow descent and then a long, long slow incline,” is how I described at the time.
I had strapped a dictaphone to my dash. Actor and playwright Sam Shepard wrote my favorite film, “Paris, Texas.” He lived in NY and when he had to go to LA for work, he'd load his dog and dictaphone into his truck and drive that fabled road west. In that cab of solitude and reflection he dictated his plays.
Hey, I was driving North to write a novel. Why not borrow from the best?
Road trips are of one of those rare times we get to see how far in the distance our goal is. I could see where I was going – the gap in the hills. But no matter how hard I pushed those three hundred-odd ponies, driving this road would take as long as the road was long.
In his Motivational Monday posts, Ryan Stewman often talks about his “overnight success” taking ten years... ten years of doing MOSTLY UNREWARDED work daily. Ten years to get to the million podcast listens per month he now gets. Ten years to build the empowering Apex empire he has today.
“The seed must grow down before it grows up. The deeper the roots, the higher the tree can grow.”
John Highley planted that gold seed on his recent Marketing Savage Coaching Call.
When “Bury Me In The Garden” won the New Writer Of The Year competition in 2007, I bemoaned it not bringing me the immediate and tangible success that I expected. After the party, the congratulations and the satisfaction had passed, not much in my life had tangibly changed.
So should I have not written that story? Are you kidding me? This Writer In Residence award was at least the second high-roller pot I had scooped into my arms after laying down those BMITG cards.
“Very often I write a story because I don't know the answer to a particular issue I'm having in my own life. The work for me is often about finding answers,” I told Joey the reporter.
So know this. The work you do contains the answers you seek.
You can't know when you will find those answers. But you should still set about your work with purpose and courage.
As Ralph Marston says in his Daily Motivator...
“Be urgent about making the effort.
Be patient about seeing the results.”
We don't know how the work we do today will pay us back in years to come.
And why do I do what I do? Here's the quote that ended the article:
“I'd like to see the visions I've had in my head for years inspire others to realize theirs.”
A dozen coffees and a thousand miles later, the Mustang's hooves crunch the gravel path leading up to the house. My high-beams startle a family of deer.
The family parts to let me pass. Their quizzical eyes ask me if I'm ready.
I'm about enter a master storyteller's house. I'm about to live into my vision.
Tomorrow: Ernest Hemingway asks me: What are you really doing here?
For my full Idaho Mountain Express interview and Reading, click below!
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